Intel or AMD, Nvidia or AMD: Where does your allegiance lie, and why?
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@technobabble I currently use an AMD PC for work and I've had nothing but problems, emphasis on the word "nothing". It's an APU, which I have to say the onboard graphics impress me, but it's terrible as a CPU. I'm moving to the yet-unreleased i7 4790K as soon as it launches on the 25th of this month, on the good 'ol 1150 socket. I have to say though, most people don't know this but AMD manufactures RAM modules, and some of them are pretty impressive. Seen them overclocked to 4133 MHz, and those 100% Purity Aluminum heatshields make them incredibly hefty, very sleek looking, and extremely capable of dispersing heat. I've currently got a 16GB kit for that, but this AMD processor limits it to an 886 MHz clock.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@technobabble said:
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/376/AMD_FX-Series_FX-8350_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-4770.html
AMD won that one on price/performance.
Even if you grab the FX 9590, the beast of a high GHz Octacore it is, the 4770K still beats it in all real world applications. And that isn't even nearly Intel's best CPU.
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@technobabble said:
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/376/AMD_FX-Series_FX-8350_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-4770.html
AMD won that one on price/performance.
Even if you grab the FX 9590, the beast of a high GHz Octacore it is, the 4770K still beats it in all real world applications. And that isn't even nearly Intel's best CPU.
That's not the point. It's the price/performance that matters. No one buys the "ultimate CPU", it's a silly goal to chase. Intel and AMD CPUs are very slow compared to what is out there.
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When people say that they have "problems" with AMD machines, what issues are those and why do you feel that they are tied to the CPU?
I've had Turions for years, have one right here, they've been great.
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@scottalanmiller AMD CPU's within the last... 5 years I'd say have not been made well, lots of problems with pins shorting out. Missing tons of instruction sets, unless you buy one of their top FX Unlocked CPU's. As far as tying issues down to the CPU, things like overheating, random program crashing, randomized PC shutdowns at irregular intervals without permission, Windows errors, and on boards with no control chipsets for storage, Miscellaneuos errors with storage, like corrupted data. Crippling Audio Errors in any type of audio solution, random ejection of drives, driver crashes, issues with supporting displays when using the APU Graphics, issues with it not reading any type of media, failure to intialize the processor after booting from BIOS... Lol, shall I go on? All issues I've had, and I know many other people who have these issues or similar ones, and the one big consistency is that they use AMD CPU's, generally on the FM2 or AM2 sockets. Also, with specific lower-end FX Processors (I'm not entirely sure how power delivery works, but I'm guessing that the CPU controls how much power it recieves), the processor will push itself to max load for no reason, draw too much power, and either fry the rails on the PSU or melt itself.
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@scottalanmiller AMD CPU's within the last... 5 years I'd say have not been made well, lots of problems with pins shorting out. Missing tons of instruction sets, unless you buy one of their top FX Unlocked CPU's. As far as tying issues down to the CPU, things like overheating, random program crashing, randomized PC shutdowns at irregular intervals without permission, Windows errors, and on boards with no control chipsets for storage, Miscellaneuos errors with storage, like corrupted data. Crippling Audio Errors in any type of audio solution, random ejection of drives, driver crashes, issues with supporting displays when using the APU Graphics, issues with it not reading any type of media, failure to intialize the processor after booting from BIOS... Lol, shall I go on? All issues I've had, and I know many other people who have these issues or similar ones, and the one big consistency is that they use AMD CPU's, generally on the FM2 or AM2 sockets. Also, with specific lower-end FX Processors (I'm not entirely sure how power delivery works, but I'm guessing that the CPU controls how much power it recieves), the processor will push itself to max load for no reason, draw too much power, and either fry the rails on the PSU or melt itself.
While CPU issues can cause a lot of bizarre problems - what you describe sounds far more likely to be software or memory issues. It would be extremely unlikely for a CPU to do that.
What missing instruction sets?
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The original question's pretty broad, so I"ll break it into home and work.
For work, I go with AMD CPUs. They have good bang for the buck, and as a virtualization engineer, the workloads I deal with are highly multithreaded, so the more cores the merrier. At present, the Opterons have up to 16 cores to work with. For graphics, I go Nvidia, as several Quadro models are supported for use with VMware Horizon View in order to bring hardware-accelerated graphics to VDI. I don't deal with end-user hardware at all.
For home, I go with AMD CPUs. Partly it's bang for the buck, but partly it's due to history and a personal tendency towards vendor loyalty. After my 486, I moved up to a K6, and have been AMD ever since. Graphics-wise, I go with Nvidia. For some reason, I've had zero luck with ATI/AMD discrete graphics cards any time I feel adventurous and decide to give them a try. Beyond that, I was a 3dfx customer, and have kept loyalty through acquisition into Nvidia.
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@alexntg Very much brand loyal as well. As far as AMD CPU's, you do get alot more bang for your buck, and their GPU's as of late have been quite impressive, especially the Radeon HD 7990 and the R9 290X. Both cards are extremely impressive, and until the R9 295X, the 7990 was the fastest single card for gaming in the world. But the drivers offer poor optimitazion and sad overclocking features, and every good AMD card I've seen since the 7970 wants to run at 90 degrees Celsius, and will even shut fans off to get itself to that temperature. I would absolutely pick up an R9 290X, if it wasn't for the fact that it is just miserable at supporting Direct X 11.2 Tesselation, and that it doesn't have access to any Market-Changing features like Nvidia does (Except AMD App Acceleration, a mind blowing feature when you see it in use, which is especially useful as a budget feature, as you can buy a horrid CPU and a good GPU, and in normal tasks the GPU will work as a an extra pre-processor for the CPU and boost performance quite a lot). I was really happy to see Mantle coming, as it was supposed to turn the tables, but it just didn't deliver. It raised performance by dropping the graphical fidelity - Something a user can do just by disbling V-Sync.
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@alexntg Old 3Dfx customer here too. I still have several VooDoo cards kicking around I think.
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@scottalanmiller Wasn't VooDoo the first to implement multi-card configurations?
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@scottalanmiller Wasn't VooDoo the first to implement multi-card configurations?
Probably. I can't think of anyone who beat them to that.
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It seems Nvidia absorbed them and their technology. I wish Asus would buy Nvidia
Not that it would ever happen, but I wish. -
@Mike-Ralston said:
It seems Nvidia absorbed them and their technology. I wish Asus would buy Nvidia
Not that it would ever happen, but I wish.NVidia bought 3dfx.
I doubt Asus is big enough to buy nVidia. NVidia is pretty big. They are a chip maker!
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Never mind. Asus has a market cap of a quarter trillion dollars. Lol.
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If Asus bought nVidia it would cause card licensing issues. Probably not worth it to them.
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Asus does the actual manufacturing for a lot of HP's gear.
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@scottalanmiller And are quite notable as some of the best aftermarket cooler producers for AMD and Nvidia, although EVGA usually makes the best Nvidia cards (You pay a bit more, though you're getting the best). Asus could easily buy Nvidia, Asus is HUGE. They are pretty much the top name for anyone looking to spend lots of money building a PC. If only they made RAM and PSUs... You could have an Asus/AMD color scheme all in that slick black and red, without having to worry about optimization or anything.
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I had an old Matrox G45o 32MB video card that was dual head VGA model with converter cable wtih S-Video and Composite video jacks. I used to dl movies via Napster and connect the PC to the TV and my audio card to the home stereo unit!
@Mike-Davis I like EVGA cards for my clients, they always seem to work with no futzing.
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Also this might be true for Intel, but I believe the issues we had with K6 and K7 processors were probably due to inferior motherboards as I was always looking for inexpensive MSI and ECS products.
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@technobabble said:
Also this might be true for Intel, but I believe the issues we had with K6 and K7 processors were probably due to inferior motherboards as I was always looking for inexpensive MSI and ECS products.
Definitely in the K6 era people were tying cheap parts routinely to the processors. Hard to tell which was causing the issues.
